


It's About Fucking Time

by lyrisey



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Emotional Baggage, F/F, Fuck Or Die, Predestination, Self-cest, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29703330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrisey/pseuds/lyrisey
Summary: Taylor gets a wakeup call... from herself.Confused? So is she.(Consent issues are discussed in author notes, if you're okay with spoilers.)
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver/Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	It's About Fucking Time

**Author's Note:**

> Short form: Time travel introduces issues of consent, even when everyone thinks they're consenting.
> 
> Long-form discussion in the end-notes, if you're cool with spoilers.

I woke up knowing something was wrong.

I didn't know what, didn't know what had roused me from sleep; I laid in bed, eyes closed, and reached out to the bugs in the walls, called out flies to sweep the house.

There was a sound. Not the faint sounds of an old house settling in the February cold, but something more familiar: the floorboards in my room creaking like I was walking across my room.

But I was in bed.

I opened my eyes, saw a figure standing beside my bed, standing over me: a ghostly figure, armor and folded cloth pale in the moonlight, a featureless mask with dark lenses looking down at me.

 _Cape_.

I breathed in, a sharp little gasp, saw the moonlight glint off the lenses in their mask before they lunged toward me, pressed a gloved hand over my mouth.

 _"Quiet."_ Her voice was a harsh hiss, roughened with intensity and exertion.

I wasn't ready for this, hadn't thought to _be_ ready; the costume I'd been weaving lay half-finished in the basement coal chute, my pepper spray was in my backpack on the floor, an eternity away.

I hadn't anticipated someone finding me before I was ready... but if it came down to it, I was going to fight.

I opened my mouth, felt a gloved finger push into my mouth; I bit down as hard as I could, felt my teeth slide across smooth-woven material, heard her let out a curse-

And I called on my bugs. Not just the flies, but spiders, beetles, centipedes, the ones I'd hidden in the walls of the house to protect them from the February chill.

I felt them surge, a swarm of chitin boiling behind drywall, ready to spill out, to find and bite and _tear_ -

And then they stopped.

Frozen.

Like someone had picked up my power like a TV remote and pressed pause.

It was unsettling, wrong, like a familiar limb going numb and unmoving. I bore down with everything I had, tried to make _something_ happen, the twitch of a leg or an antenna, tried to find that control again-

"Taylor- Taylor, _stop_ ," the cape hissed, bending over me until her mask brushed my nose and dark hair cascaded across my face. "I'm not going to hurt you, but I need you to be _quiet_."

My heart was hammering, my pulse beating in my neck like a double-time drumbeat.

I watched as the cape pulled away, used her free hand to pull her mask off her face-

And I stared, because the moonlit face I saw revealed was _mine:_ a little older, a little tireder, squinting down at me the way I was squinting up at her, trying to focus without my glasses.

"I'm not going to hurt you," the other Taylor said. "But I need to talk to you."

* * *

"You're from the future," I said.

I was sitting up in bed; the other Taylor was sitting on the edge of my bed, glove off as she looked at the red teethmarks I'd left on her skin.

"Yeah," she said, crooking her fingers and wincing. "I can't tell you much, but... you can probably guess that time travel is real."

"Yeah," I echoed, looking down at the mask I was holding, tracing fingers over the pale grey curves, feeling the clean lines of armor plate. "My- our? The costume I'm working on, it's not like this."

She smiled slightly, a little twist at the corner of her mouth, and it struck me how _comfortable_ she looked - not just sitting on my bed in a superhero costume, but how she clearly felt about _herself_ , the long lines of a body she didn't hide behind bad posture and baggy clothes. "Give it a year or two."

I looked back down at the mask, felt the weave of the spidersilk on the sides and back, finer and smoother than even my best efforts.

 _A year or two_ , I thought. _To become_ this. _Become her_.

"Do..." I said, fumbled for the right pronoun. "Do we have a good name? I haven't been able to decide on one."

"Weaver."

I looked back down at the mask again, watched blue lenses glint back at me.

 _Weaver_. It was a good name.

"...are you allowed to tell me that?" I asked after a moment. "Future stuff, I mean. You said you couldn't tell me anything."

"I said I can't tell you _much_ ," the other Taylor said. "Although I don't know if there's rules about that."

I couldn't help smiling a little. "They let you travel in time without telling you the rules?"

"I wouldn't say _let_ ," she said. "It was... kind of an on-purpose accident? Like what that Robert Ross guy says for his catchphrase, the action hero?"

"Happy little accidents," I said, and she smiled back at me.

"Pretty much, yeah. I didn't know when I was going to get the chance, I just knew I had to be ready."

"Ready for..." I trailed off. "You planned to come back," I said, and she nodded.

"There's something I have to tell you," the other Taylor said, and all that easy softness in her face and her voice drained out of her.

I felt the bugs stir uneasily in the walls and swallowed. "Okay."

"It's twenty-eleven for you, right? February?"

"Yeah," I glanced at the clock. "The fourteenth."

She pressed her lips together. "So it's been about a month and a half since you t-since you got powers."

I shifted under the bedcovers, uncomfortable. "...yeah."

"...I remember being here," the other Taylor said finally, looking at the mask in my hands. "I remember how it felt; the frustration, the isolation."

She lifted her gaze, brown eyes meeting mine. "How it felt to not have power. To have something you wanted to be more than anything, and never knowing if you would have the chance to _be_ that."

There was a knot in my throat, like someone had made a meatball out of regret and broken glass and forced me to swallow it whole.

She was right; I'd been isolated, so painfully _alone_.

Until now.

The only person who knew what I'd been through had been me.

The only person who had _cared_... had been me.

Until now.

Until the girl sitting on my bed looked me in the eye and summed up my life in a few short words, pulled up the feelings and the hurt I'd tried to forget and left them fresh and raw right under my skin.

For the first time in over a year, I felt _seen_ , known, and I hated it and wanted it more than anything else.

"Hey."

My vision was blurred; I blinked, pushed my glasses up, knuckled away tears, found the other Taylor smiling at me, her eyes shining.

"It gets better," she said. "Not like that bullshit you get about how once you get out of high school it won't matter. I mean it."

She awkwardly patted my leg through the comforter. "It gets better, Taylor. I'm the proof that it does. I'm the message."

There was something awful welling inside me, something that I'd buried for months starting to push up against everything I'd spent holding it down.

"You're so strong," she said. "Even with everything the way it's been, with all the awfulness... it _ends_ , Taylor. You get through this."

I remembered a story my mom had told me, a knight driving a sword into the ground until water sprang forth.

"You're going to be okay, Taylor. You're going to be _great_."

The sincerity in her voice cut deeper than anything Emma had ever said; the sound that came out of my mouth was raw, animal emotion.

I closed my eyes, felt the wet of tears race down my cheeks; the other Taylor made a soft sound, sympathetic-

-and then her hands found my arms as she embraced me.

I jolted, startled as she pulled me in. My lips grazed over her skin, following the line of her cheekbone back to the curve of her ear; I breathed in, smelled the subtle spice of her hair and skin, leaned against the plane of her body as I relaxed against her, gloried in being held, being _loved_.

And then I realized what I'd done.

I started to pull away, opened my mouth to try and apologize-

-and her arms tightened around me. "It's okay," she whispered. "It's supposed to be this way."

I pulled away again, and she let me go this time, watching my reaction, my incomprehension.

"This how it was for me, two years ago," she said. "When I was sleeping in my bed and I met a Taylor from the future, who told me what I told you."

"...you've been me." I said the words, didn't feel them.

She nodded.

"And I'm going to..."

She tried to smile, her thumb stroking my shoulder. "That's up to you. I'll be gone when you wake up."

I tried to think, couldn't, my future and her future and our past jumbling together, awash in the knowledge that I wanted what we'd just had more than anything.

"So... what happens next, then?" I asked, and the other Taylor smiled, pulled me back in, and the softness of her lips met mine.

* * *

I awoke to sunlight coming through my bedroom window, watching dust motes dance in a sunbeam with fuzzy clarity. I lay there, felt the aching enervation that came when I'd started pushing myself on my runs, remembered the dream.

What I'd dreamt last night was so impossible, so _clear_ in my mind; the ache of my future self's words, the heat warming my cheeks like hot sand as I remembered what came after.

I shifted under the covers, stretched, felt my muscles protest... and I realized that the weight over me was too heavy, too dense, too _solid_ to be my blanket.

There was an arm draped over me, a warm body pressed to my back, breath tickling the nape of my neck.

I was in my bed. And so was someone else.

I rolled over, found myself nose to nose with-

-with her. The girl from my dream, the me from my future, black hair spilling over her face as she blinked at me sleepily; she frowned, focused, her eyes widening-

"Oh," she said. "Oh, _fuck_."

**Author's Note:**

> I believe talking about consent is important. The Archive offers us the tools that allow us to curate our experiences and avoid content that we don't want to be exposed to.
> 
> I believe there are elements of this story that result in the characters involved being unable to consent, which is why it has the Rape/Non-Con archive warning. 
> 
> For some readers, this warning is a sufficient indicator that this is a story they're not comfortable reading, and I want to make it clear that I respect that.
> 
> However, I also recognize that there are readers who find this warning insufficiently informative. Sometimes comfort isn't a binary, but a matter of degree and nuance: The details of how something like non-con appears in a work informs our decision about whether we want to read or not.
> 
> These details are included below; be aware that while there are spoilers, I've tried to remove triggering content.
> 
> This is a story about time travel. A Taylor from a future time [Taylor A] travels back to interact with her past self [Taylor B].
> 
> There are implications within the work that suggest that the interaction between Taylors A and B is but one iteration of a loop where a Taylor is interacts with her future self, progresses through time, and then travels in time to interact with her past self.
> 
> For me, the work raises consent issues in two specific cases:  
> First, Future Taylor [Taylor A] believes that in order for her existence to continue, she must travel back in time and interact with her past self, or she will -stop existing-. In an indirect way, her life is being threatened by the circumstances around her, which I feel impacts her ability to meaningfully consent.
> 
> Second, Past Taylor [Taylor B] believes that she's consenting freely, but the larger context of the work suggests otherwise.
> 
> As I've mentioned previously, the interaction we see in the story is the end-state of a shifting loop with potentially uncountable iterations: A Future Taylor travels back, shares information with a Past Taylor, who then becomes a Future Taylor traveling back to share information with another Past Taylor.
> 
> The information being shared is not a constant from iteration to iteration; Taylor is playing a game of telephone with herself, where the only sure thing is that whatever she shares -has- to result in a Taylor traveling back in time to share information with herself.
> 
> This means that over these iterations, the information Taylor brings back with her has evolved, refining itself so it's easy for Future Taylor to convey, as well as effective at making sure Past Taylor is in a position that ensures that in -her- future, she will travel back in time and share a similar message.
> 
> This raises questions of predestination and free will, and feels analogous to a situation like Contessa pathing her way into someone's bed: the other party may -feel- like they have a choice in what's happening, but the game's been rigged all along.
> 
> As a result, I don't feel that this is a situation where Past Taylor can meaningfully consent, as the circumstances of the situation mean she's being told things in a specific way to produce an outcome she never had any control over.


End file.
